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Campaigners in Henley say insufficient number of bathers to qualify for status is result of poor water quality
Bathing water rules in England should be improved to help drive a clean-up of pollution at a spot on the River Thames in Henley, campaigners say.
In a letter to the environment secretary, Emma Reynolds, businesses, river users, community groups and civic leaders said poor water quality had been damaging the town and had put public health at risk.
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Brussels will relax state aid rules to allow member countries to offer ‘targeted and temporary’ support
The EU will cut electricity taxes and provide consumers with fresh incentives to ditch fuel-burning cars and boilers, the European Commission has announced, as the energy crisis from the Iran war speeds a shift to a clean economy.
The plan, which foresees tweaking rules so that electricity is taxed less than oil and gas, aims to bring down bills while encouraging the move away from polluting devices that prolong reliance on foreign fuels.
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Council proposal to use glyphosate to tidy up pavements criticised over potential harm to humans and wildlife
Cornwall is famed for its glorious gardens and verdant landscapes but a bitter row has broken out over a plan to tackle a less glamorous type of vegetation – roadside weeds.
The unitary authority has announced plans to use the controversial herbicide glyphosate to tidy up pavements and kerbsides, after largely phasing out its use over the last decade amid concerns about potential harm to humans and the peninsula’s rich ecosystems.
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Unwanted vessels left to decay release fibreglass shards into the water, harming marine life. Steve Green – with his trusty van Cecil – is determined to clean things up
Steve Green, a boat engineer from Cornwall, was pulled over by the police just before Christmas. He was driving a decrepit-looking VW campervan and towing an even more dilapidated yacht up to Truro. He hadn’t broken any laws, but he admits that Cecil the campervan, which runs on donated chip oil from local pubs and has a crane and a winch on the front, “wasn’t quite what VW intended”.
Green (and Cecil) are on a mission to rid the beautiful hidden creeks of Cornwall’s Helford and Fal rivers of 166 abandoned fibreglass yachts, which are leaking plastic and toxins into the predominantly marine waters. Marine biologists have likened the thousands of shards of fibreglass they have found embedded in the flesh of sea-creatures in areas with wrecks such as these to asbestos, a substance known to have a noxious effect on humans.
Green uses a detachable crane system at the front of his van to move around bags of plastic after they have been weighed. Cecil is upholstered in recycled denim
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Fiona Harvey tells Nosheen Iqbal why the climate crisis is a threat to national security
“Last October, I and other journalists got quite excited because we thought that we were going to be attending a great event at the Natural History Museum,” the Guardian’s environment editor Fiona Harvey tells Nosheen Iqbal.
“We had been told that there was a major report being launched at this event. And this report was going to come not just from where you’d expect – from the government’s environment department – but also from the joint intelligence committee, and they are the UK’s spy chiefs, MI5, MI6, the intelligence agencies. And they were taking an interest in the climate and biodiversity and the threats that they pose to the UK’s national security.”
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About 500 farmers challenge Green Gen Cymru in high court over alleged disregard for landowners and biosecurity
A group of 500 Welsh farmers have brought a landmark legal claim to the high court over the alleged conduct of a green energy developer planning to build electricity pylon routes across their land.
The court will hear allegations that Green Gen Cymru “unlawfully sought entry to private land, intimidated landowners, and showed disregard for biosecurity and basic rights”, as well as examine laws that force landowners to sell property to utility companies, in a hearing on Tuesday and Wednesday.
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St Mabyn, Cornwall: Many apiarists opened their hives this spring to find hardly any sign of life. In Richard’s case, he found nothing at all
Richard Bray’s hives stand in a crooked line at the edge of the apple orchard, beside a low thicket of nettles. Richard was “brought up with” beekeeping here at Haywood farm, and at the peak of his apiary business had 250 hives; today he has seven. This spring, for the first time in 75 years, none of his bees survived the winter.
Richard lifts the lid of the first hive, releasing a sour smell of old wax and honey. “There’s nothing,” he says, “that’s very worrying. You’d expect to [at least] see dead bees in there. But there isn’t a bee anywhere.” An inspector from the National Bee Unit advised that the loss was caused by the varroa mite, a notorious destroyer of bee colonies. “I’ve never had anything like this,” Richard tells me. “Varroa mite? I don’t know.”
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Donald Trump’s conflict with Iran could speed the EU’s green revolution – if panicking governments can hold their nerve on clean energy
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A surge in demand for electric vehicles across Europe may be evidence of what George Monbiot greeted as the silver lining of the Iran war. Sales of electric cars in continental Europe rose by 51% in March.
The International Energy Agency has called the disruption in the strait of Hormuz the “biggest energy crisis in history”, but it appears, on one level, to be accelerating Europe’s green revolution. Yet, even if car-owners are rushing to the EV showrooms, some European governments, facing a groundswell of anger over soaring petrol and gas prices, are at risk of sending the clean energy transition into reverse.
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As rising gold prices fuel environmental destruction, communities in the country’s biodiverse heartland are passing laws against mining
Mahogany trees tower above Herminio Mamani as he tends his cacao farm in Bolivia’s biodiverse north-west. A former president of El Ceibo, the country’s largest organic cacao co-operative, he says the agroforestry model used by its 1,300 members is vital not only to maintain the quality of the cacao they grow, which is used for chocolate and other products, but also for keeping gold mining at bay.
“We cacao producers would never kill an animal here,” he says, parrots squawking nearby. “The parcels [of land] can never be monocultures – all the crops grow together.”
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Analysis of video footage reveals how wave changed as it travelled over mud-rich rice paddies, exerting more force
It is just over 15 years since the devastating Tohoku earthquake and tsunami struck Japan, killing almost 20,000 people and triggering the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. Fresh analysis of video footage of the wave has revealed that the mud-rich coastline made the tsunami far more destructive than it might otherwise have been.
Patrick Sharrocks, from the University of Leeds, and colleagues studied helicopter video footage, along with before and after images from Google Earth, to estimate the speed, shape and power of the tsunami flow front. They found that as the wave travelled over mud-rich rice paddies it changed from a fast-moving, clear-water flow into a thick, gloopy, mud-laden one.
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